Romanticism

German Literature

Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Romanticism & the Fairy Tale

German Romanticism began in the 1790s as a movement of young writers who wanted to make life and art one, and it spread to poetry, tale, song and scholarship. It looked to the Middle Ages, to nature, dreams and the folk, and it left Europe two durable gifts, the literary fairy tale and the study of folk tradition. This chapter follows the early circle at Jena, the poets Novalis and Eichendorff, the uncanny tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the ironic Heinrich Heine and the Brothers Grimm. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Romantic Turn

The Jena circle

Around 1798 a group in Jena, including the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Ludwig Tieck, set out a programme for "Romantic poetry" in their journal the Athenäum (check). They wanted a poetry that mixed genres, criticism and philosophy, and that stayed unfinished and open.

Novalis

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772 to 1801) died young. His Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with its image of a blue flower, became symbols of Romantic longing (check).

Against Weimar?

The Romantics admired Goethe but also argued with the classical ideal of balance (Chapter 5). They preferred the fragment, the dream and the medieval to the Greek, though the dividing line is less sharp than it looks (check).

Poets, Songs and Strange Tales

Writer and work (check each)Note
Joseph von Eichendorff (1788 to 1857)Poems of forests, wandering and homesickness, many set to music by Schumann, Wolf and others (see German Music). His novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Life of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826) is a light, lyrical tale of a wandering young man.
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776 to 1822)Lawyer, composer and writer of uncanny tales. Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816) is a story of madness and an automaton, and Freud later wrote about it. Nussknacker und Mausekönig (1816) is the source of the ballet The Nutcracker (check).
Heinrich Heine (1797 to 1856)Born into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf; his Buch der Lieder (1827) made him famous, with poems such as the "Loreley". He moved to Paris in 1831 and combined Romantic form with irony and political satire (check).
Heine's irony Heine uses Romantic images (the moonlit river, the lost love) and then undercuts them with a sharp last line. His later work attacked German nationalism and censorship, and his books were banned in several German states in the 1830s (check). A line from his early play Almansor, "Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too" (1821), is often quoted in connection with the Nazi book burnings of 1933 (check the wording and origin).

The Brothers Grimm

  • The collection. Jacob (1785 to 1863) and Wilhelm (1786 to 1859) Grimm published the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) from 1812, with later editions revised many times (check).
  • Collecting or writing? The tales came from friends, acquaintances and printed sources, not only from peasants, and Wilhelm in particular revised the style and content over the editions (check; see The Brothers Grimm & German Fairy Tales).
  • Scholarship. The brothers were also pioneers of the study of German language and folklore, including a historical dictionary begun in the 1830s and a grammar (check).
  • The Göttingen Seven. Both brothers were dismissed from their university posts in 1837 for protesting against the abolition of a constitution (check).
  • The Kunstmärchen. Alongside the folk tale, Romantic writers composed literary fairy tales by named authors, for example Hoffmann and Tieck.

Romantic Themes

  • Longing (Sehnsucht) for something distant in time or space.
  • Nature and the forest as a place of freedom and danger, still a strong image in German culture.
  • The uncanny and the double, where the familiar turns strange.
  • The folk as a source of poetry, which fed both fine scholarship and, later, nationalism (check how the Romantic idea of the folk was used).
A British comparison English Romanticism ran parallel, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, and Coleridge spent time in Germany and was influenced by its thought (check). Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the Gothic tradition can be set beside Hoffmann, and the Grimms' collection beside the work of Scottish and English collectors of ballads and tales.
Check the details Dates, titles and the history of the Grimm collection are from general knowledge, and the picture of the brothers as simple collectors has been revised by scholars. Verify with the editions you use, and be careful when attributing political meaning to Romantic images, which were used by very different movements.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Describe three characteristics of German Romanticism and give one writer or work to illustrate each.

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Exercise 2

Explain how Heine uses Romantic conventions and why his work differs from that of Eichendorff.

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Exercise 3

Assess the claim that the Brothers Grimm "simply wrote down what peasants told them", and say how you would check it.

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Quick Reference

  • Early circle: Jena, the Schlegels, Novalis, Tieck (check)
  • Poets and tales: Eichendorff, Hoffmann, Heine
  • The Grimms: Kinder- und Hausmärchen from 1812 (check)
  • Themes: longing, nature, the uncanny, the folk
  • The caution: the "folk" idea served different politics